Sunday, July 31, 2011

Republicans, Loaves and Fishes

It's one of the those rare moments when I find myself in (temporary) alignment with Wall Street. A bunch of crazy Republicans with guns want to kill the Government so badly they are willing to take the whole economy down with them.

Wall Street Republicans have always been aligned with Main Street Republicans, but the corporate assault on Main Street thinned the ranks pretty well. At some point Wall Street strategists (of course I'm generalizing here: some, not all of them) and conservative corporate strategists decided they needed reinforcements if they were going to run the nation to their liking. Those reinforcements came mainly in the form of Conservative Christians. This started in the 1960s, and would be more important in the long run that The Beatles or LSD.

The alliance went pretty well (for Wall Street) for a few decades. Wall Street and the corporate elite supplied the money. To the Christians they offered rhetoric about abortions and prayer in public schools. The Christians got to worshipping Free Market Capitalism almost as if it came out of the Bible. Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and George W. Bush illustrated how well the system could work when it was working.

But as deluded as Christians are, they are not quite unthinking zombies. They have lively egos, and many started thinking they should actually be in charge, not the Wall Street boys. They are pushing economic ideas that would have seemed primitive to Jesus himself, like returning to using Gold as money.

They tend to be Old Testament guys, because the New Testament contains a lot of messages they don't want to here. Like loving people [John 13: 34], paying your taxes [Luke 20: 25], wolves in sheep's clothing [Matthew 7: 15] and holding all things in common [Acts 4, 32].

In short, they forgot the Loaves and Fishes [Luke 9: 12-17]

But he said to them, "Give them more to eat". They said, "We have no more than five loaves and two fishes." ... For they were about five thousand ... He took the five loaves and two fishes, and looking to the sky, he prayed over them, and broke them, and gave to the disciples to set before the multitude. And they did eat, and were all filled.

Medicare and Social Security are the loaves and fishes of modern America. If you can provide them, you can get by with all kinds of other kinds of business and government folly. You can talk up the Republican God, Free Market Capitalism, all you want, but people want jobs with good pay, homes, and a safe environment. Republican experiments this last decade with free markets have led to homelessness, joblessness, and hopelessness.

Having forgotten to bring out the loaves and fishes, Republican politicians, and particularly Tea Party pea brains, will be abandoned by the crowds, and crucified in the next round of elections. I am guessing they will lose ten seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in California alone in 2012, the way things are heading.

Hopefully the Republican Party will implode. If America remains a two party system, hopefully the new 2nd party will be based on sane, pragmatic, modern thinking. We still have to save the environment, which is going downhill at a rapid pace. We have to make things right for ordinary working people. That means disassembling the corporate security state and the concentrations of wealth that have emerged since President Kennedy started cutting the top tax rates on the wealthy back in 1962. We would not need to tax the rich at such high rates if they used their profits to hire more workers at better pay, but they have shown over and over again that they (as a class) are incapable of behaving responsibly.